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Potential Justice Offers a Counterpoint in Chicago

WASHINGTON — When President Bill Clinton had a rare opportunity in 1995 for a Democratic president to fill a vacancy on the federal appeals court based in Chicago, a bastion of conservative thinking, he received an unusually strong recommendation from Senator Paul Simon.

Mr. Simon, an outspoken liberal from Illinois who died in 2003, told the president the new judge should be a reliable progressive who would be cerebral enough to go up against the court’s two formidable conservatives, Judges Richard A. Posner and Frank H. Easterbrook. He said it should be Prof. Diane P. Wood of the University of Chicago law school.

In the years since Mr. Clinton took that advice, Judge Wood has established herself on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, in the view of scholars and lawyers, as an unflinching and spirited intellectual counterweight to Judges Posner and Easterbrook. She has taken on that pair and some of the court’s other conservative judges across a wide range of cases including abortion, immigration and access to courts.

Beyond her record of ideological combat, Judge Wood enjoys some other advantages in the early handicapping. Mr. Obama knows her from the time they spent as colleagues on the faculty of the University of Chicago law school, where they were friendly but not close. And some of Judge Wood’s opinions seem to speak to Mr. Obama’s expressed desire for justices who have “empathy” for people who come before the courts.

In a 1999 case, Judge Wood wrote the majority opinion for a three-judge panel overturning a deportation order for Natalia Nazarova. An immigration judge had issued the order after Ms. Nazarova was two hours late to a hearing because her interpreter could not be found.

In great detail, Judge Wood recounted Ms. Nazarova’s travails in dealing with the immigration system, saying her ordeal was reminiscent of “Richard Gere’s character Jack Moore in the 1997 movie ‘Red Corner.’ ”

Ms. Nazarova, she wrote, was told that an interpreter would be provided for a preliminary hearing but was not given one. So, Judge Wood wrote, Ms. Nazarova took steps to get her own interpreter for the formal deportation hearing.

The interpreter did not meet her until nearly two hours after the scheduled 10 a.m. start time, and when they arrived at the court, she discovered that the judge had already ordered her deportation because she “failed to appear.” Worse, Judge Wood wrote, she was ordered deported to Russia, even though she was from Ukraine.

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Judge Diane P. Wood was on a law school faculty at the same time as President Obama.Credit
Lloyd DeGrane

“When her interpreter failed to appear on time, Nazarova faced a serious problem to which there was simply no good solution,” Judge Wood wrote. She could have gone without the interpreter, but the proceeding would have been “incomprehensible gibberish” to her, as it was at the earlier hearing, the opinion said. Ms. Nazarova, Judge Wood wrote, deserved another chance because “she would have been deported without ever having the opportunity to be heard.”

Judge Daniel A. Manion, a noted conservative on the Seventh Circuit, dissented, saying he would uphold the deportation order because Ms. Nazarova had had a third choice: trying to explain her situation to the judge.

Judge Wood dissented in an opinion by Judge Easterbrook that would bar a Jewish family from bringing a lawsuit against a condominium association for repeatedly removing the family’s mezuza, a religious item, from their door frame. The case is to be heard by the entire Seventh Circuit on Wednesday.

Geoffrey R. Stone, who was provost of the University of Chicago and dean of its law school, said, “Diane is a serious and accomplished scholar who has demonstrated the ability to go toe to toe with Dick and Frank,” both of whom, he added, “can be intimidating figures.”

The first-name references reflect that Mr. Stone and all three judges — along with Mr. Obama — know one another from having taught simultaneously at the Chicago law school, known for its competitive hothouse atmosphere. It is a world Mr. Obama knows well and can draw on as he makes his selection.

The lesson to be drawn, Mr. Stone said, is that Judge Wood would not be intimidated by any of the Supreme Court’s conservative voices, like Justice Antonin Scalia, also a former professor at the law school at Chicago.

On the bench, Judge Wood has been a strong supporter of abortion rights, writing a dissent against bans in Illinois and Wisconsin on what opponents call partial-birth abortion. She also ruled that the National Organization for Women could use an anti-mob law to sue anti-abortion demonstrators, a ruling ultimately reversed by the Supreme Court. And she dissented from an opinion by Judge Easterbrook upholding an Indiana law requiring a pregnant woman to attend counseling before obtaining an abortion.

She also overturned an immigration judge’s ruling denying a Chinese woman’s efforts to avoid deportation because she said the woman had a well-grounded fear of forced abortion in her homeland.

Judge Wood, who earned her undergraduate and law degrees at the University of Texas, brings a personal story emblematic of women of her generation trying to balance family and career. She clerked for Justice Harry A. Blackmun in the Supreme Court’s 1976 term. When she began teaching at the University of Chicago law school in 1981, she was the only woman on the faculty, and she was eight months pregnant. She had three children in five years. Prof. Lea Brilmayer of Yale Law School, who had preceded her as the only woman at Chicago, said the school in those days was “distinctly inhospitable” to women on the faculty.

Judge Wood spent her early years in Westfield, N.J., and moved to Houston as a teenager with her family when her father, an oil company accountant, was transferred there. To fit in at her new high school, she became an accomplished twirler. Friends say she has always made time for hobbies; she has developed a more refined skill, playing the oboe, which she does in three local orchestras.

Mr. Obama has talked about the virtues of selecting a justice with broad personal and political experience. Judge Wood is, however, largely a creature of the elite slice of the law that revolves around law schools and federal courts. Her daughter, Kathryn Hutchinson, once said that on family road trips, the children did not ask, “Which state are we in?” but rather, referring to the 12 regional courts of appeals, “Which circuit are we in?”

Correction: May 14, 2009

An article on Tuesday about the possible nomination of Judge Diane P. Wood to the Supreme Court misidentified the organization that filed a lawsuit about picketing at abortion clinics, a case on which Judge Wood ruled. It was the National Organization for Women, not Planned Parenthood.

Correction: April 23, 2010

An article an article on May 12, 2009, about the possibility that President Obama might choose Judge Wood to succeed Justice David H. Souter, misidentified the town where she spent her early years. It was in Westfield, N.J., where she lived until she was 16 — not in nearby Plainfield, where she was born.

A version of this article appears in print on , on page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: Potential Justice Offers a Counterpoint in Chicago. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe